"Conservative forces in the U.S., both secular and religious, have been campaigning for years against certain court decisions, and what they consider excessively activist judicial interpretations of the Bill of Rights," Jeffrey Simpson wrote Tuesday in his column Harper's counterattack on the activists
"In Canada, court rulings have never provoked the stormy controversies of some U.S. judicial decisions," he adds.
"Abortion and capital punishment, for example, don't roil Canadian politics as they do in the United States. There's no Senate ratification process in Canada that could become politicized. The Supreme Court of Canada under Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin has shown more restraint than the court did previously.
"Simmering resentment, however, has existed in conservative ideological circles for some years about judicial interpretations. In fact, one of the leading intellectual critics of judicial activism, Prof. Ian Brodie, currently sits in the Prime Minister's Office as chief of staff.
"And so the backlash has [recently] taken policy form and hit the front pages."
What do you think?
Are Canadian judges too activist? Or are they merely upholding the Charter, as they should?
Mr. Simpson was online earlier today to take your questions on the issue, and on federal politics in general. Your questions and his answers are at the bottom of this page.
Some of his most recent columns have dealt with human rights in China and climate change.
Join the Converation at that time or submit a question or comment in advance. Your questions and Mr. Simpson's answers will appear at the bottom of this page when the discussion begins.
Mr. Simpson has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes — the Governor-General's award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award for column writing (twice). He has also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism. In January 2000, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
He joined The Globe and Mail in 1974. His career with the newspaper began at City Hall in Toronto and with coverage of Quebec politics. In 1977, he became a member of the paper's Ottawa bureau, and eighteen months later he was named The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau chief. From 1981-1983, Mr. Simpson served as The Globe's European correspondent based in London, England. He began writing his national affairs column in January, 1984.
Mr. Simpson has published six books — Discipline of Power (1980); Spoils of Power (1988); Faultlines, Struggling for a Canadian Vision (1993); The Anxious Years (1996) and Star-Spangled Canadians (2000). His most recent book, The Friendly Dictatorship: Reflections on Canadian Democracy (2001), was nominated for the Donner Prize as the best book on public policy.
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Jim Sheppard, Executive Editor, globeandmail.com: Welcome, Jeffrey. It's always a pleasure to have you on The Hill_Live, our weekly online discussion from Ottawa about federal politics. We've got several dozen questions for you already.
Let's get started with the big picture. Recent polls seem to suggest that the Harper Conservatives and the Dion Liberals are in a virtual dead heat in public opinion. What does that mean in terms of the likelihood of the much-rumoured possible spring election?
Jeffrey Simpson: Jim, it means there won't be a spring election.
The NDP doesn't want one either because it would lose seats. And the Bloc's cousins in Quebec aren't likely to do very well in the provincial election, so they won't want one either.
These predictions are from someone whose record of predictions (apart from getting Stéphane Dion right) is about the same as the Ottawa Senators playoff record — looks good until the chips are down.
Kenneth Johnston, Regina: There didn't seem to be any real smoking guns in yesterday's Auditor General's report. What happened? Is it true that she's friendlier to the Harper Conservatives than she was to the Liberals?
